I don’t know how to compare Pentaho with BusinessObjects, I think that is not an useful exercise, you can find tons of functional comparatives.

From my modest knowledge, Pentaho is this type of open source tools that have an excellent growth and that reachs a level of functionality/performance/reliability that allows companies to be used for different purposes.

If you try to compare it with BusinessObjects, I could say that Pentaho covers 70% or 80% of the functionality / capabilities. But, is it determinant? I don’t think so.

If you are a big corporation, your goals are clear and your IT strategy requires a business intelligence platform to cover (an ensure) a wide range of business needs, then you should get BusinessObjects.

On the other hand, you can be in some of this situations,

you have the capacity to assign one or two guys working on a business intelligence tool to provide some type of information but you don’t have (or it’s not worthy) to invest in a tool for it.

It could be for internal results that you don’t want to create overhead.

You are thinking on a business intelligence solution for a business problem.

You can do a pilot with a open source tool demonstrate some early results and justify the business advantage that you could get using this type of tools.

You don’t have enough money.

You are involved in a project and you need an interim business intelligence solution that at the end of the project you can throw to the garbage.

You are a little company and you need a solution that you install and works.

then, why don’t use Pentaho?

You always can change to other solution, or lose just less money than paying licenses from the first day.

In these type of situations Pentaho has a more competitive advantage with respect BusinessObjects

It’s something that is essentially presented as a “service”: platform as service, solution as service, wine as service….

But it also should have some technical features that makes you able to identify as “cloud”.

It’s offered in an independent platform.

There is proven security in terms of data and is privacy compliant (this is the main question of the clients).

There is the possibility to synchronize the cloud data with the local data.

It’s available off-line.

It’s mobile, you has to be able to access to it from anywhere.

If the service does not provide some of these features, the type of contract is “something as a service” but it’s supposed it’s not cloud 🙂

From my point of view, that I’m not involved in the complex processes of building neither of these products; I’m just considering some of these solutions for my client. That means for me that almost all the time, I’m reviewing contract details about how these services covers SLAs, availability, how they guarantee security, what are the penalties in case of unavailability, what is the minimum time we need to contract the services, how are the implementation processes and how is the service support organized,…. prices.

So for me the cloud is essentially another way to contract IT services, paying just a fee.

Understand what has to be done, understand the responsibility of leading a work team during a year, understand that lead a team is not something easy, the trust, work with team, understand young people, share things with them, how to approach, intelligence, to win the thing, compete, enjoy each play, is not easy, offensive philosophy, timing…

The important things: people talking not about my health, talking about my game.

Lately I see how the value of the age is not a raising asset, and I don’t understand why.

Watching videos like this is something that makes me enjoy this value,

If you have the opportunity to watch a F1 race on TV you will see as the interesting things happen:

on first lap,

when cars enter to change wheels (once or twice a race),

if you’re lucky, on last 2 laps (someone breaks the engine).

A race is around 80 minutes and just 10 are interesting. Where’s the emotion of seeing it. Last week in Barcelona, the TV speaker told: the average of overtaking in last 3 years was 4.

In addition, TV is always talking about the drivers and not about cars or the engineers of the cars. Almost everything in F1 is data and forecasting about what’s the expected behaviour of the cars in the 61 laps.

F1 teams knows what’s going to be the behaviour of the car in the theory after the Saturday tests, whether conditions and other huge amount of parameters. Teams also know how is the evolution of their cars with respect the other teams, and they work to improve it along the season.

Imagine, bet companies are be able to share all this relevant information into their portals, providing business intelligence tools and standard forecasting for allow the users to analyse this data and then make the deal. (is it friki? 🙂 )

Is the driver a factor? yes, and lucky? for sure.

But the sport watched on TV does not show the real competition on the asphalt.

I had some time and a notebook and I wrote this thinking about the IT service support trends.

It seems to be a stupid exercise, but it’s funny to see that the concepts offered yesterday, today and probably tomorrow, all are the same. With the risks and fears of the client, it’s more or less the same thing.

and from the simplest to the more complex projects, your client can find pieces of work that for your perception should be “out of scope” but from their perception is “in scope”.

For sure, perceptions are not contracts, but they can turn in unnecessary discussions that could disturb your client confidence. Apart of the extra-efforts you will have to do to explain that “this” is out of scope.

I have seen this week how a project manager was giving explanations that could be solved with a better “out of scope” definition.

In this case there has not been major problems, but in other cases you can loose a big piece of credibility, so we have to take care.

We work in complex environments where you have clear identified activities under your accountability and other activities derived of the position you have.

If you are service manager you have to deliver all the activities derived from the service perspective: green SLAs, reports, RCAs,…

On the other hand, there will be some other things that are required to you. These requirements that are directly related to your service but they are not part of your daily activities and that seems to not be initially important. People start to make questions as:

“…what is more important SLA or this excel to fill in?…”

Of course SLA is more important, no doubt, but it’s also supposed that you know you work in a complex environment and that this type of ‘other’ information I’m requiring to you is in some way important: in short term is not important for your service but in long term it could be. You should be aware that account activities tries to work on future contracts, capabilities, contractual requirements at account level… so please attend this punctual requests.

I have explained in the monthly meetings the incoming requests you are going to receive with this respect and the business objective we pursuit with this information, so you should know it, isn’t?